Chinese Zodiac

Year of the Monkey 猴

Clever, inventive, and endlessly curious.

The Monkey solves problems sideways. People born in Monkey years tend to be quick-witted and inventive, delighting in a clever workaround and getting restless with the obvious route — playful on the surface, sharply strategic underneath.

Years of the Monkey

Recent and upcoming Monkey years are 1980, 1992, 2004, 2016, 2028, 2040. One catch worth knowing: the Chinese zodiac year doesn't begin on January 1st — it starts at the lunar new year, in late January or February. If you were born in January or early February, check the exact cutoff for your year before you count yourself a Monkey.

Monkey personality

Intelligent, versatile, and quick to learn. A Monkey finds the angle no one else spotted and makes hard things look easy.

Cleverness can turn to restlessness or cutting corners — a Monkey may outsmart the moment and lose the patience a slower, surer path would need.

Monkey compatibility

Monkey clicks with the quick Rat and ambitious Dragon, matched on wits and pace. The suspicion with Tiger, its opposite, runs both ways — two clever signs slow to trust each other's motives.

In the zodiac's structure, the Monkey sits in a trine group (三合) with Rat and Dragon — signs that tend to share its pace — and directly opposite Tiger, its clash pair (六冲). A clash isn't a verdict, though: it usually means two people reaching the same goal by opposite routes.

Beyond the year

Your animal sign comes from your birth year alone — the coarsest layer of a Chinese chart. Its fixed element is Metal, but a full BaZi (八字) reading adds your month, day, and hour, which is where most of your actual character shows up. Two Monkey people born years apart can be very different once the rest of the chart is drawn.